"If you pick it, it won't get better". Emotional wounds.

I woke up this morning. The radio was on. There was a woman crying. A younger woman (it turned out to be her daughter) said, "Don't keep talking about it." The woman said, "We must keep talking about it."


It?


It was 9/11.


I wanted to shout at the radio, but then I generally do want to shout, when people insist that talking about something emotionally painful ad nauseum will help healing.


Really? Why do they think that?


If I have a physical wound, with some care, it should heal. If a doctor or nurse told me to attend the surgery every week, where they would tear the scab off, take a scalpel to the wound, put on a new dressing and tell me to go home, I would have grounds to sue them for negligence. The wound would become toxic, spread, not heal and I could become extremely unwell. I could die.


Are emotional wounds so different?


An emotional wound is acquired. They are a normal part of a healthy life.  How and why we have been hurt is now immediately in the past and has become a memory.  It hurts. It hurts like hell.  We need to make sense of it. We may want to change it.  We replay the memory over and over again. We re-live the memory in all its minutiae.  We pick at the memory. It leaves a scar. The more picking, the larger the scar.


It is also to Big Pharma's benefit that the wounds stay toxic and some other businesses too, especially therapeutic businesses.


The brilliant brain has been created to deal with memories of every type. The memory will stay fresh in the mind and then move to another part of the brain for storage. A memory bank. A place where the memory can be filed with the millions of other memories we have in a lifetime. Filed away very deeply and with all or nearly all of the attached emotion removed. The memory is labelled, just in case we might need it again.


The brain's filing system is not perfect.  It's filing system is a bit like 'Google'. We key in a something we're looking for and hundreds of matches come up, most totally unsuitable. More often than not, we're not even looking for anything particular ourselves. Something sensory in our environment triggers the brain 'google' search and up comes a memory match.  We can experience an emotional hijack. Ready to be picked over - if we chose to. eg: Hearing a snatch of some music.


Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is the extreme of this memory matching. There is no choice available. Professional help should be sought, but not help where talking about the trauma over and over is encouraged. Memories can be de-traumatised without the need for talking about them. In fact talking about painful memories, can create PTSD.


Memories, even terrible ones, that can be 're-told' like a story, are not traumatic anymore. They are called narrative memories.
Memories than are 're-lived' in the retelling, are traumatic memories.
Memories than haven't been traumatic, can become traumatic with too much re-telling. (De-briefing after major incidents has had to be re-assessed, as it can create more problems than it solves.)


My July blog on trauma: http://emotionalgrowth.blogspot.com/2011/07/im-very-very-scared-trauma.html


This week, a well known British comedian, David Walliams, is swimming up the River Thames, for the Comic Relief Charity.  I don't particularly warm to the man himself, but I admire his strength of character and how he is using his fame to raise a considerable amount of money.
( http://www.sportrelief.com/whats-on/the-bt-sport-relief-challenges-walliams-vs-the-thames)


The first 60 miles of riverside didn't mean much to me, but the next stretch of 80 miles to London is like a trip down a personal memory lane from 1949 -1994. Last night, his stop was in a town called Marlow in Buckinghamshire. His arrival was on TV and as I watched, a lump appeared in my throat and tears welled. A bucket load (18 years) of memories flooded my brain.


I had a choice. To wallow in the flood, picking at the wounds (happy and sad) or put the file away again and deal with the present. I indulged myself and wallowed for a while, then filed it away again.


9/11. I read today of someone from New York, who is moving out of the city for the weekend of commemorative events. He said, "I will remember it, but I don't need to re-live it."


This man has made a choice.  Perhaps a wiser one than the woman mentioned at the start of this blog. He is showing emotional intelligence.


©RitaLeaman2011